A refrigeration appliance having a body whose interior compartment receives the products to be cooled and can be closed by a door movably attached to the body, and further having at least one opening and/or closing mechanism acting on the door, is described, for example, in EP 2 299 214 A2. The opening and/or closing mechanism described in this publication is made up of an electric motor whose shaft carries a pinion. This pinion forms part of a gear drive mechanism which serves to move two parallel toothed racks in an axial direction. Each of the toothed racks serves to operate a respective one of two doors of the refrigeration appliance. Accordingly, this opening and/or closing mechanism must be disposed approximately centrally on the refrigeration appliance; i.e., on the side of the doors opposite the hinge side thereof. However, as a result of this very special design of a refrigeration appliance, the opening and/or closing mechanism can only be used for refrigeration appliances having several doors, where the doors open centrally and are therefore hinged at opposite sides of the body of the refrigeration appliance. Moreover, the entire opening and/or closing mechanism is complex in design and difficult to assemble from a production engineering point of view, because the gear mechanism employed includes a plurality of individual gears.
A comparatively simpler design is described in KR 10 2009 0128907 A, which describes an opening and/or closing mechanism where the shaft of the electric motor also carries a pinion which is in direct contact with a toothed rack. This toothed rack moves a piston. The piston acts directly on the door of the refrigeration appliance, thereby enabling an opening movement of this door. A magnet is provided at the end of the piston to assist the closing movement of the door. While such an approach is, on the whole, relatively simple in terms of construction, it has the disadvantage that the individual components cannot be installed into the refrigeration appliance until it is assembled, which altogether results in considerable complexity.
One proposal to obviate this disadvantage is made in DE 10 2009 053 714 A1. This document describes generally a household appliance whose closing system is designed as a structural unit. This is an advantage form a production engineering point of view, but the closing system is disposed in the door of the household appliance. Such an approach is disadvantageous because it considerably increases the weight of the door, which has an impact in particular on the design of the closing systems. Consequently, these closing systems must be made sturdier than would be necessary if they were installed into the body.
Further, DE 20 2006 010 482 U1 describes an assembly having a bearing for pivotally mounting a door or a hinged cover, in particular a door or a hinged cover of a refrigeration appliance. This assembly includes a frame or housing accommodating a plurality of components including, for example, the closing device itself, a damping device, as well as an opening-limiting device. This document does not provide any details on the installation of this assembly. Therefore, it may be assumed that the assembly is disposed conventionally in the hinge area of the door.
Modern refrigeration appliances are becoming increasingly large. The advantage of this is that they offer more space for the products to be stored in the interior compartment of the refrigeration appliance. However, the increasing size is associated with the disadvantage of increased weight of the door and the resulting consequences for the design of the existing opening and/or closing mechanisms. Moreover, today, such refrigeration appliances are no longer produced and sold only on a national scale. Rather, refrigeration appliances are marketed all over the world and must therefore meet different requirements. One very important aspect is the ability to flexibly select the hinge side of the door and thereby increase the diversity of variants. If it were possible to change the hinge side of the door, there would be no need to provide a plurality of appliance models for different installation environments. Overall, therefore, such an approach would lead to a simplification and standardization of the design of a refrigeration appliance.